Village heroes lifted the cup

Fifty years ago, a Castleford mining village football team, Fryston Welfare Colliery, beat Bradford’s much-fancied Thackley AFC in the final of the West Riding County FA Challenge Cup.

Today, the anniversary of this 1-0 victory was being marked at Fryston Miners Welfare with a gathering from past and present.

All surviving players from the 1963 final are expected to be there. The widow of Fryston’s goalkeeper Archie Ward was flying in from Australia.

The book’s publisher Route is tagging it as a “story of sporting heroism and romance, where the names of heroes like Dick and Jabie Foulkes, Archie Ward, Jack Sharp, Agga Mattison, Cobbo Robinson and Freddie Howard resonate just as loudly as those of the professional icons, such as Clem Stephenson, Len Shackleton, John Charles and Stanley Matthews, who we also encounter along the way”

Well up to a point, Lord Copper. While there is much resurrected detail from David Waddington’s frequently “discouraging and exasperating” research experiences to engross the friends and families of Fryston Welfare and local amateur football historians alike, I wasn’t reminded of Roy of the Rovers, but Michael Palin’s Ripping Yarns.

Take the big match itself, which took place at East End Park, Leeds, on Wednesday, May 22. Fryston’s Trevor Ward sounds just like Palin’s character Gordon Ottershaw recalling the footballing opponents of his beloved but hopeless Barnestoneworth United.

“They turned up did Thackley and when you saw ‘em, you thought. ‘Phew! We haven’t got a life on! No way!...We were stood at one end, hammering the ball into the goal, and they were at the other, gleaming, just like Real Madrid.”

The only goal of the game, dominated by Thackley, was scored by Fryston’s version of Cristiano Ronaldo, Freddie Howard, who once scored 89 goals in a season. But against what standard of opposition?

Evidently Mr Waddington did not see the game and therein lies one of the problems of this kind of dispassionate, retrospective sports reporting – the lack of personal feeling galvanising the facts and quotes so carefully compiled.

Fifty years ago the everyday story of a Yorkshire colliery football team would have made a cracking serial in The Rover or The Hotspur, read eagerly week by week all over the country.

But these days, when the offspring of some jobless people reportedly aspire to be either a gang leader or a celebrity, who is going to be interested in the post-war work experience of Bradford Park Avenue footballers Len Shackleton and Jimmy Stephen at Fryston colliery?

David Waddington, an academic at Sheffield University, was not prompted to spend three years researching and writing this book to provide the workless and the workshy with morally-uplifting tales of working-class life as it used to be.

“My main motive for writing this book is unashamedly personal: my father, Peter (Pete) Waddington, was captain of the Fryston team that played Thackley in 1963...” he says in the book’s Introduction.

Fryston, I subsequently learned, is said to be the most photographed village in the country, due to the obsession of local barber Jack Hulme who spent 60 years and a lot of money snapping his friends and neighbours.

On the back of that, Route may score a nice little niche seller with this publication, in spite of it costing nearly £13.